The Sisters Of Mercy - Różności - Wywiady

From "Prayers to a Broken Stone" (Volume II, Issue 1)
Available from Morpheus Laughing (ieya@u.washington.edu)

INT: Why has it taken so long for you to actually, well it's not good or bad, the reason you finally hooked up with a major for distribution. Why did you hold out for such a long time? Cus you've been playing since 1980, 1981, basically. And you're from Leeds, and maybe you could explain about Leeds also and that scene out there.

AE: Well, there isn't a scene. That's one reason we live there. Apart from the fact that we like it and that's really the sort of place we belong. We certainly don't belong in london. it didn't really make it any harder coming from leeds, not necessarily. I think certain people in london don't understand when a band wants to stay 200 miles away. In canada, 200 miles isn't a long way. But here there's a big difference between living in london if you're a band and living in anywhere else.

INT: What's the difference?

AE: Well, the difference is if you live in a provincial town which is this month's thing you become instantly famous. If you live in leeds it takes you a long time. (laughs) The reason it's taken us so long to get hooked up with WEA is because we were doing well enough on our own not to let anybody distribute our records except in the way we wanted to. And for the amount of money that we felt was necessary in order for us to continue doing our job in the way that we want to do it

INT: You mentioned in your press release about being independent, but still retaining a sense of professionalism and not really sort of being considered an amateur, even though a lot of people usually regard an independent group as sort of like an amateur outfit in a sense. Who's distributing your records, Merciful Release, prior to WEA?

AE: In England, the Cartel and then in Canada they were just exported. We distributed records through the Cartel from a base in York, were the people are very good, but it must be said that there are parts of the Cartel which are pretty weak. It's very hard to be a professional independent band when you have to deal with a lot of very amateur people, pressing plants, printers, particularly. One of the very sad things about independents here in england was that for a lot of people it was an excuse for sheer amateurism. We realized without having to think much about it that the way that we wanted to develop was unlikely to make us instantly famous. And given that you've got to be sure to do your job properly. The harder the music is, the more perverse it is that you want to make, the more you gotta accept the consequences. The consequences are you get famous very slowly. That's ok, cus it means by the time you are famous, you're very good at what you do and hopefully we're just about there. We'd like to think so.

INT: Can you talk about heavy metal music, what are your feelings about it? I've read in past interviews that you don't take it too... uhm well you don't make fun of it really, I mean its' not as silly as...maybe it's a misunderstood sort of...

AE: It is grossly misunderstood, the term heavy metal has been grossly adulterated in the last ten years or so. We have an irreverent love of it. It is irreverent, but it's very loving.

INT: In what way?

AE: It's very important to us. It's very easy to take the piss out of heavy metal, and we do a great deal, we take the piss out of everything. But you can't get up night after night or use as a vehicle for what you have to do, a sort of music that you'd don't love in a very basic and simple way at the same time as you recognize the ridiculousness of it. That's the great thing about it. Heavy metal is the extreme of music which you can take anyway you like, preferably every way at the same time.

INT: Just sort of curious if it was a conscious attempt to not hire or include a drummer, a real drummer, within your line-up.

AE: Not really, we've never felt the need for one...

INT: Why? I'm curious...

AE: We have now have a very sophisticated machine and all the excuses we, well not excuses, all the reasons we had in the past for saying "yeah, well drum machines are good, the one we've got maybe doesn't do all the things we'd like it to do...", have now evaporated because we now have the machine we want. We now have a state-of-the-art drum computer. So we'll see, I think the result on the album tour should obviate the need for any further questions anybody has about "do we need a drummer". It's just the same as people might have said if we were, like a 50s band, "why the hell don't you have a saxophone?" Why should we have a saxophone? Why should we have a drummer? It's....

INT: ...totally irrelevant really, for you...

AE: It is. It is. We don't deliberately have a drum machine as opposed to a drummer. We recognize the need for percussion, but if we had a drummer we'd only want him to do what the drum machine does anyway and the drum machine does it an damn sight more reliably.

INT: Yeah, and in a sense maybe it started off as far as when you were first getting the band together, maybe you were working at home and you were working with one anyways and you found that it was a lot easier to work with a drum computer, a rhythm machine or whatever...

AE: That's certainly true. There was only three of us and none of us was a drummer and the personal chemistry of the band's always prevented an extra person joining, especially a drummers, who is a breed monstrous and moronic generally. Also in Leeds it would have been very hard to get a band off the ground at all if we'd had a to rehearse with a drum kit. You can rehearse at any volume you like with a drum machine and it might not be as much fun as playing really loud, but at least you can get to do it. Even now, the band rehearses in the cellar of one of the members. And we wouldn't be able to do that if we had a drum kit. So there are practical advantages, but I then I guess they might have been the original reason for having a drum machine, but the practical advantages certainly now outweighed by the fact that we're very happy with the drum machine at the moment and we certainly don't see the need for a drummer. It does everything a drummer would do. In fact, funny enough, we're gonna do a radio session tomorrow and for the first time when I was programming some of the drums for it yesterday, I programmed them in in real time, not necessarily on the beat, so there's a little looseness there, so maybe they'll be a little less clinical than they've been before. I mean I actually think we benefit from having the clinicalness of the drum machines we've had before, which would always play on the beat and absolutely reliably. The new one, you can introduce that little bit of leeway if you want, and we'll see how that sounds. It might be interesting. But the new one we can do almost anything with it we want. People say at gigs, "Well, uh, you can't be spontaneous with a drum machine". With this one we can, ok, we can walk up to it and make it do anything we want. We don't actually get to sit behind a kit and bang things, but we can stand there and hit it's knobs and it makes the same noises. The average home computer in this country, the basic basic one, costs around 50 quid. This drum machine costs 2000 pounds. It's a very sophisticated computer. It'll do well nigh anything.

INT: Well, what is it actually?

AE: It's an Oberheim.

INT: It's an Oberheim DMX. Or, DMX, yeah...

AE: Yeah, it's a DMX.

INT: Right, they're very nice sounding...

AE: Yeah, well apart from that, you can put any noise it in you please. If you send your noises to Los Angeles, they'll send you a chip back and you just slot it in.

INT: You mentioned that you went to tour the states during August of, during the summer of 1983. How did an independent band get it together to get out there? To get out to North America from all the way from Leeds?

AE: Firstly we have a few very good friends with a little bit of clout over there. That means that we have someone putting our records out who's very good at hitting the right people. So although we don't sell any noticeable number of records in the states, well you can't if you're an independent anyway, we're reasonably well-known here and there. So we do ok, but's it's a consequence of having a few friends.

INT: Yeah, I think I heard last year you were staying in New York for a while, I'm not to sure, cus I got confused after a while cus I knew that you were playing some shows around certain parts of the States, but I didn't know if you were British or American, it was very confusing because it was like, uh, well I knew you were British, but a lot of people have said you were living over there for a period of time.

AE: Most of that was just a one in then out.

INT: Oh, really...I see, ok, I was just wondering about that...

AE: But we did spend a lot of time there last year and the beginning of this year. It's a good place.

INT: Did you enjoy it?

AE: Yeah, a great deal.

INT: I mean what part did you like the best?

AE: The night time. Plus there's been one most noticeable thing about America after [something] the place, is that it's 24 hrs. And for people like us that's pretty useful. It's disgusting the way most towns in this country shut at ten o'clock in the evening.

INT: 11 o'clock, yeah. 10 o'clock I guess in some parts.

AE: Earlier, I mean this place is like Peterbrooks, never get up at all. (laughs) I mean there are plenty of dead towns. There are plenty of dead towns in America to, but the American metropolis is a wonderful thing. We even like the people.

INT: What's so wonderful about America though?

AE: Apart from the fact that it's open late?

INT: No, you said it's a wonderful metropolis. And I'm just wondering what you mean by that.

AE: Mostly cus it's open late. But America's a great place, it's just that, there's nothing which is America strange to because we're bombarded with American culture here all the time anyway. First time we went, everybody was winding us up beforehand with. "oh, you'll either love it or you'll hate it. No it's a really extreme place". No, it's just a logical extension of England. England's like an American colony.

INT: You think so?

AE: Yeah.

INT: I would have thought it was the other way around.

AE: Well, I guess it used to be, but I wouldn't say it was now.

INT: Oh, you mean, the British are trying to sort of, with a lot of the hamburger stores opening up downtown in London, and all over.

AE: Television and films, all the things that make people behave in the way they do.

INT: Do you think this could be said of your musical influences taste to a certain extent about being American influenced, I mean a lot of your press releases they mention stuff about the Stooges and Velvet Underground, various things like that. And I'm just wondering if those kind of comparisons are, those remarks kind of get on your nerves after a while. It's an excuse for people to categorize the Sisters of Mercy very easily.

AE: Well, given that people have to do that, we don't mind so much if they mention people we like. But those comparisons are no more valid than all the comparisons to old English rock bands. We just have the perspective to realize that those bands were American influenced as well.

INT: What were some of the real surprises of the past few years when you've been recording some of the tunes that have been real surprising for you that you've never really envisaged going to the studio and having it turn out like the way it did.

AE: By the time we actually began to experiment even in the slightest in the studio. When we had time to experiment even a little bit, we'd already had a chance to record at home with a cassette system. So it wasn't just a question of doing something in rehearsal, and if it works in rehearsal with everybody playing together, then you try it in the studio. We'd also tried stuff which was not live based.

INT: And Afterhours is really quite good. 94 degrees and 2 o'clock in the morning? Or something? Sounds like it's in the middle of a city or something, very very hot, very...

AE: 44th street. Yeah. But I shifted it a few blocks down so I wouldn't actually get pinned down to the actual occurrence which lead to that being written.

INT: That was in the New York Hotel was it?

AE: Yeah. You can tell can't you. I mean there's so much amphetamine. To me that song is pure amphetamine. It's the most amphetamine sort of, song I ever, it works in a completely different time scale to everything else. It's not the sort of all-out gonzo amphetamine song. Although we got a couple of those, but it's sort of one of those tingle tingle tingle, "was that a minute or was that an hour?" songs. There's a a lot of cars hiss by my window in it as well. Which is a very L.A. song and the thing which prompted the writing of Afterhours is very similar to something in L.A. which might have prompted the same song. So it's like L.A. and New York rolled into one.

INT: What's the presentation like live with the Sisters of Mercy when they're playing at the concert.

AE: We got into smoke recently. They gave us smoke last time we played in New York and we really got off on it. So we use a lot of smoke these days. And we had a lighting engineer on the last tour who really knew how to light the stage with smoke and we had a great time wandering around in this fog. It was very effective, it was very very stupid, and very silly,but at the same time it really affected you like smoke is supposed to affect you in that sort of bozo gut-wrenching heavy metal way.

INT: I know I have to get going, she's telling me to get running. There's just one thing I want to know, there's another quote here I took from your press release. "The Sisters writhe in the legends of Altamont..." well they meant Altamont as in Altamont Speedway the Rolling Stones, when they played early seventies San Francisco, Altamont Speedway right?

AE: One of the reasons Gimme Shelter is so important. We changed the words around in Gimme Shelter. The original was about how love's just a kiss away and war is just a shot away. We turned it around. Altamont's very important. If there's a part of history where rock music stopped for a second and we began. If there's a point were the seeds of what we do were sown, it's probably Altamont, cus it encapsulated everything wonderful at the time. The good things and the bad things, and a lot of both. It's when the trip turned sour and it's when the best music was.

INT: It was slightly dangerous at that time. Really, for a few minutes there.

AE: For one guy especially. But it encapsulates so much, Altamont.

INT: I'm wondering just before we wrap up. Body and Soul is a very important song to you, because I just wanted to talk about the other songs on the ep too that are a lot different than that one.

AE: Body and Soul is an important phenomenon more than an important song. Anybody that understands that will under it and anybody who doesn't won't have much, I won't explain what that means.

INT: Was the name [Sisters of Mercy] just inconsequential, did you just wanted anything or for those people that are really concerned about the name actually, how that came about for those one's that are curious.

AE: Laughing Lenny Cohen. Yeah, it does mean something. Cohen used it to mean prostitution. And we always felt the overlap between nuns, I mean there is actually an order of nuns called the Sisters of Mercy, and all the catholic, with a small 'c', dogma that that implies. And at the same time the prostitution which Cohen brought in was a very simple metaphor for a rock 'n' roll band.

INT: What you like to end up with playing for everybody at the station here as we wrap up the show. What song would sort of kiss-off this interview very nicely.

AE: Problem is that at any given time, everybody's got, like, they're all-time favorite song of the week. And I guess we've all got a different one this week.

INT: Well what's you're favorite song of this week?

AE: No, I get my favorite song played a lot more, it's definitely someone else's turn. I got a two hour show on Belgian radio last week so I've definitely had my share.

INT: Ok, who are we going to ask here....

[interview degenerates into "you choose, no you choose". Eventually Gary, I believe, chooses When the Levee Breaks from Led Zeppelin IV. Which Andrew says would have been his choice as well, go figure :-)

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